UE NEWS Updates

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Trumbull, CT

The support staff for the Trumbull Board of Education, members of UE Local 222/CILU Sub-local 21, have overwhelmingly ratified a new four-year contract. Gross wages will increase by 3.5 percent per year, a total of 14 percent over four years. The first raise is retroactive to July 1, 2007.

Health insurance costs were a major issue, and members were able to limit increases in cost sharing to only a few percent. Employee contributions will be 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent and 13 percent, respectively, in the four years of the new contract.

Winsted, CT

Tolland, CT

Tolland County Fire Dispatchers, members of UE Local 222/CILU Sub-local 76, have negotiated and ratified a new four-year contract. Bucking the national trend, these workers gained retiree medical insurance for the first time, while substantially increasing their wages.

The new agreement, which goes into effect July 1, 2008, will provide each worker, after retirement, with up to $800 for medical insurance. If the policy costs more than that, the retiree will pay the difference.

Iowa City, IA

We reported in the December 2007 UE NEWS that the University of Iowa had sued UE Local 896/COGS, in an attempt to escape their obligations under contract language they agreed to earlier last year, specifically language requiring them to give the union job information about employees the union represents.

Milwaukee

Members of Local 1135 at Tulip Corp. said “no” to a discriminatory and insulting “final offer” from the company, and called the company’s bluff when it tried to force acceptance of its offer by illegal threats. As a result, for the first time they forced the company to improve its final offer, and they achieved equal percentage raises for all workers.

Durham, NC

St. Albans, VT

On January 21 – Martin Luther King Day – Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I) was enthusiastically welcomed by workers at Stanley Associates, who are organizing to become members of UE. The union has petitioned the NLRB for representation elections for 400 workers in Vermont. Two days after the Vermont rally, UE petitioned the NLRB to represent an additional 600 Stanley workers in Laguna Niguel, CA.

Lancaster, OH

Workers at Ralston Foods voted unanimously on January 23 to affiliate their independent union with UE. The vote was 140-0. Just a month earlier, these same workers had voted in an National Labor Relations Board election to leave a do-nothing union that had represented them poorly, and in which they did not have their own local union. By a better than 90 percent margin in the December 19 vote, more than 200 members opted to form the Independent Food Operators. There are 230 members in the new bargaining unit – they produce breakfast cereals.

South Boston, MA

Resisting a frightening list of company concession proposals, and in the wake of layoffs and the movement of some of the shop’s work to Mexico, UE Local 262 members at Cole Hersee – who manufacture electrical and electronic switches and connectors for the vehicle industry – have negotiated and ratified a new three-year contract.

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